The Forgotten Highlander - Alistair Urquhart [99]
Hello folks, this is your old son, aged 26 years, coming to you by ‘courtesy of the once Imperial Japanese Army’. That’s what they told you if they ever gave you anything. Well, I hope you are all well and happy and I hope looking forward to my homecoming as eagerly as I. It has been a long troublesome and heartbreaking period those last six years but you and I have at last got a break and well deserved I think. There is little need to tell you as some of the stories are already in print, that we have been treated worse than pigs, but thanks to God, I am spared. At this point let us pause for a few moments in memory of so many of my fine pals who helped me through in those days of torture in Thailand, but who were lost at sea on the journey to Japan.
We left Nagasaki on the aircraft carrier ‘Cape Gloucester’ and were transferred on to the ship at Okinawa, where we are en route for Manila, where we should arrive on the 29/9/45. The experience of the last three and a half years has taught me many lessons and hard ones. The crowning joy will be my arrival at the station at Aberdeen.
Please give my kindest regards to my relations and if any to my friends of the pre-war years. Gee, it’s going to be embarrassing trying to pick up the threads again especially in my future job, whatever that may be.
Mother there is one person you have to thank more than anyone else in the world for my presence here now, and that is Hazel Watson. It appears that while I was lying in hospital at death’s door very ill with dysentery and beriberi, my pals had done everything they could do to make me buck my spirits up and make a fight for it, but I must have been in a coma, I cannot remember much of what happened. However, they raked out my photographs and as Hazel was the most prominent and most likely my girlfriend, they kept repeating her name and showing me her photograph. They said it was not till three hours later, that I seemed to recollect and began repeating her name over and over again, which was the turning point, as I gradually grew better day by day, weighing approximately five stone at that time. But, please mother keep this to ourselves as I do not wish her to know, as it puts her and myself in an awkward position. I believe she is married but am not sure. I have never managed to determine my feelings for Hazel, but it is sufficient that the thought of her pulled me together at the critical moment.
I only wish that the fellows who looked after me then and gave me what little supplies of milk and eggs they risked their lives to steal off the Japanese guards, had been spared for this day.
Well mother that is the terrible price of the war, and we can only hope there will never be another. Hoping this finds you as it leaves me. All the best, love to all at home, hoping to see you soon. Cheerio, your ever loving son, Alistair XXX.
Denis Southgate, who preferred to be called ‘Tiny’, even though he was larger than me, asked what I was writing. I told him but he just shrugged.
‘You should write home too,’ I said. ‘Your parents would be thrilled to hear from you.’
‘I don’t think so,’ the twenty-two-year-old marine replied, sounding defeated.
‘Nonsense man. Here.’ I shoved a pen and paper in his lap. I sat beside him on the camp bed. ‘I’ll help you.’
Maybe camp life had broken him or maybe he was illiterate but words failed to come. I basically dictated a simple letter home, addressed to his mother in St Austell in Cornwall, and he seemed to cheer up a little.
The days at sea went slowly and my mind kept returning to the haunting memories of our POW existence. Playing quoits on deck could preoccupy me for only so long. My recurring nightmare of surrender at Fort Canning continued and the Black Prince, the Mad Mongrel, Hellfire